Richard Thomas time travels on Hallmark
He knows his birthmark, he knows his favorite meal, but what Dick (Richard Thomas, left) doesn't know is how the young Richard (Kaj-Erik Eriksen, right) will take the news he's traveled a lifetime to deliver. "Time After Time," a Hallmark Channel Original Movie, premieres Saturday, March 19 (9 p.m. ET/PT, 8C). Credit: Crown Media Holdings, Inc./Photographer Eike Schroter Credit: Crown Media Holdings, Inc./Photographer Eike Schroter/Eike Schroter
John-Boy is back: Richard Thomas, nearly 40 years past the homespun sentiment of "The Waltons." He's making contemporary homespun sentiment here, transported from Walton's Mountain in Depression Appalachia to what we're told is a quaint East End Long Island town of today. That might fly, with the picturesque roads and village shopfronts, if it weren't for those background mountains betraying a British Columbia shooting location.
But the film's emotions are universal. A 30-year-old disillusioned journalist named Richard (Kaj-Erik Eriksen, "The 4400") heads back to the hometown he fled 11 years earlier as "one hard-case kid." Moping that "my life hasn't turned out the way I thought it would" -- and expressing it in handy TV-movie lines like that -- Richard gets back his old job at the local paper in Glenville, where a Sir Save-a-Lot megastore looms on the horizon (near the mountains, probably).
His old girlfriend (Christine Chatelain, "Sanctuary") still runs her parents' diner, and the new town doctor is the old town doctor's son. Everybody watches everybody else longingly through picture windows -- most of all, a 55-year-old guy named Dick (Thomas), who seems to know an awful lot of intimate facts about Richard, and, say, aren't their names, actually, you know, the same?
MY SAY Yup, it's the old time-travel-back-to-your-youth-and-fix-everything tale. But Thomas knows how to invest simple ideas, even far-fetched bunk, with quiet emotion. No histrionics, just sincerity. His younger castmates get the drift, and together they effectively sell their homey hooey.
As semi-sci-fi, the film's plot seems to violate so many traditional rules of time travel that it's best to just go with the flow. At least there's a twist every once in a while that keeps you on your toes.
BOTTOM LINE Have Kleenex at hand, and look for "local" angles (proctologist at the Suffolk County Petting Zoo!).
GRADE B
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